Essential vinyl

The first time I was truly amazed at the way my musical tastes have changed as I got older was when I heard Fried Hocky Boogie by Canned Heat more than two decades after its release. When Napster and Kazaa came on the scene so that we could share our digital music files, I looked for music that I had owned on vinyl back in the day, and there I saw that classic by Canned Heat. It took a while to download, but I finally got it down and I loaded it into Media Player and...

Oh, my aching ears. It sounded so good back then, but hearing it through the filter of history, I couldn't believe it was so bad. Especially the lead guitar, whoever he was - awful!

Rent the Woodstock DVD, and compare Canned Heat to the stellar work of Ten Years After, with Alvin Lee's lightning fingers.

I also find that the Doors don't sound nearly as good as they did back then. The difference isn't nearly so stark as with Canned Heat, but I was thinking about essential albums while on my walk the other day, and I realized that if you buy Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine and something with all the singles they released, you have pretty much everything they did that was listenable. And I long since realized that Jim Morrison's lyrics, which seemed so deep back then, were pure crap. You're never really sure what the blazes he meant by any of it.

Yeah, I know that John Lennon wrote two books that were virtually meaningless, as well as I Am the Walrus, but I'm pretty sure he meant them to be nonsense. Jim Morrison was trying to be profound.

So I'm going to list my Essential vinyl albums here. I make the choices based on the quality of the entire album. Not just stuff that happens to have a monster hit - the whole thing has to have quality from the time the needle hits the groove. And quality of lyrics counts. They're in alphabetical order, to spare me from having to rank them.

• The Alan Parsons Project: Turn of a Friendly Card
• Art Garfunkel: Angel Clare
• Badfinger: Magic Christian Music
  
• The Beatles: Abbey Road, White Album (actually named The Beatles)
  
• Bee Gees: Cucumber Castle
• Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman
• CCR: Bayou Country
• Eagles: On the Border, Hotel California
  
• Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
  
• Jethro Tull: Aqualung
• Jimi Hendrix: Are You Experienced
• Kansas: Left Overture
• Kim Hill: (self-titled)
• Larry Norman: Only Visiting this Planet
• Led Zeppelin I (II almost made it)
  
• Linda Ronstadt: Living in the USA
• Paul McCartney and Wings: Band on the Run
• Paul Simon: Graceland
• Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon
• Second Chapter of Acts (with Annie Herring): In the Volume of the Book
• Simon and Garfunkel: Bookends, Bridge Over Troubled Water
• The Who: Tommy, Who's Next
  
• ZZ Top's First Album (they actually named it that - think positive, I guess)
  
• Zombies: Odyssey and Oracle (briefly renamed Time of the Seasons)

You may disagree about some of my choices, and you may be appalled that I failed to include your picks. Feel free to add a comment adding your own if you want. But don't attack mine - my opinions are my opinions, just like my underwear is my underwear.